Warm fuzzy feelings from my web server logs

I love to see it when people explore and discover new things for
themselves. Sometimes it's just a matter of suggesting that a doorway
exists, metaphorically speaking, and then they'll dash through into a
whole new world of possibilities.

I realized the other day that I can actually tell if some of my
"lessons" are working by keeping a careful eye on my web server logs.
Last month, I wrote a
post
about writing a really quick hack to read the
"protofeed"
file I now create for these posts. I recorded all of the steps required
to do this and put it up as part of my
"/edu/" project.

As it turns out, when people get
the first recording
working, it shows up as a hit to "/w/protofeed" in my web server logs.
It's pretty distinctive, too, since it looks like an ordinary run of
curl and isn't something like a web browser or one of the usual web
search engine crawlers.

This is pretty cool! It's just so rewarding to see it all coming
together. Someone pokes around at the "pfr" lesson recordings, and a
few minutes later I start seeing hits to that protofeed file. I know
that could only happen if they managed to glue it all together and got
things running.

To everyone out there who's playing with this stuff, you are awesome.
Thank you for checking it out, and I hope you will enjoy the future
recordings I have planned.'

The past couple of recordings have evolved our little "QUERY_STRING"
grabber into a nice little library and bounced a bunch of made-up
strings off it via the testing suite. It's about ready to be used in
an actual CGI program which is called as the handler for a form
submission.

That's when actual browsers get involved, and it will start looking more
like a web application and less like a bunch of scaffolding. Once we
lay down a foundation, it might be surprising just how many things can
be built on top of it.